With luck, this will mean a wind turbine question pops up. I do hope so, for it will give me the perfect opportunity to the point out yet another of the myriad reasons why wind turbines are such a monstrous and utterly indefensible blight. Apart from being ugly, noisy, expensive, inefficient, destructive to wildlife and incapable of doing the one thing that notionally they're supposed to do – "reduce CO2" – they are also BLOODY DANGEROUS.

For chapter and verse on this go to Caithness Windfarm Information Forum. It has compiled a list of accidents and fatalities caused by wind turbines. Since the 1970s, for example, there have been at least 133 fatalities caused by wind turbines. The worst of these was an accident in Brazil last year when a turbine fell onto a bus, killing 17 passengers.

Really, though, given the proliferation of wind farms in the last five years – and given their inherent instability and the number of wind turbines now being placed irresponsibly next to people's homes or to roads – it's amazing that the death and injury rate hasn't been higher.

At this site – Windbyte – you'll find plenty more examples of recent near misses.

And lest you think this is the perniciously biased propagandising of an evil climate change denier probably in the pay of Big Oil, Big Carbon, Big Koch, etc allow me to remind of the latest convert to the anti-wind cause. Here is what one man wrote in a letter to Torridge district council objecting to plans to erect an 84 metre turbine at Witherdon Wood in one of the loveliest parts of North Devon.

I am James Lovelock, scientist and author, known as the originator of Gaia theory, a view of the Earth that sees it as a self-regulating entity that keeps the surface environment always fit for life… I am an environmentalist and founder member of the Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood and misapplied. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilisation.